David Bowie’s “Thursday’s Child”.
Tomorrow I shall present a paper on music videos and non-musical sounds at the sixth edition of the Music and the Moving Image conference organised by New York University. The complete paper will be available for online reading or download in my writings archive. Here is the abstract:
Continuing a research project on unconventional elements of music videos,[1] which complements the existent scholarly investigation on these works,[2] this paper analyses the use of non-musical sounds in this form. Sounds that are not instrumental or vocal music may have different functions in a video, that is, they may be put in relation with the music track in various ways. Such aural elements may have a narrative or expressive function, for example, helping to define a fictional world or conveying the interiority of a character. They may also be used to contextualise the song in a recognisable place or to decontextualise it, projecting the song into an unreal universe. Music videos like David Bowie’s “Thursday’s Child” (1999) and Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For” (2004) ask us to hear the songs afresh. Through their salient non-musical sounds, these videos also remind us that, as Michel Chion has argued,[3] music videos combine images and sounds instead of simply adding one to the other. Therefore, examining the usage of non-musical sounds in particular music videos involves considering each one of them as a whole — in other words, as audiovisual works.
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[1] See Sérgio Dias Branco, “Music Videos and Reused Footage”, Scope: An Online Journal of Film & TV Studies 15, “Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation”, ed. Iain Robert Smith (2009): 111-21, http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/chapter.php?id=10.
[2] See, e.g., Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) that focuses on the conventions of music video.
[3] Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Borbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xxvi.
